HP's Slate: The Beginning

HP’s Slate was first unveiled in January by Steve Ballmer himself proclaiming in such a way a long life friendship and partnership which both Microsoft and HP shared.  HP was really deep in Windows 7 roadmaps and wanted to deliver to the market a tablet which would be easy to operate as it should share the basic logic of the Windows OS. At that time in January the tablet was coming, the success was inevitable and the partnership was solid. Only a few persons kept on asking whether Windows 7 meant for a PC with greater hardware abilities will be suitable for the hardware like a tablet. In addition, the price range rumored to be at about 1,500 also was frightening. Nobody wanted to pay that much for a device capable of that little in comparison to a PC or even a laptop for the same amount of cash.

But business is very incredulous of feelings and emotions as they all seem very illusive and easy to break.  And in the majority of cases it stands true.  After the acquisition of Palm inc, when HP had spent about 1.4 billion dollars the situations changed drastically.  The greatest dowry of Palm was its webOS platform – of high quality and optimal performance rather spoiled by inefficient marketing policies of former Palm's management. And it would be very unreasonable not to use the offered chance. In late spring HP confirmed it was not going  to support Windows-tablet plans any more and was, on the contrary, dumping them in favor of Palm's webOS.
The idea at first seemed like a mercy-killing and there are definitely few people who would like to spend about 1,500 dollars on something with a functionality easily found at a netbook for $300.  No doubt, Slate tablet running Windows 7 OS did have certain prospective, mainly due to the position Microsoft and its products occupy at the enterprise market.  In all those industries which are Windows-centric that tablet would be of use presenting an easy and convenient working tool. The only issue: the price should be lower but that criteria is easily managed by presence of other competitive products of the same category. When the iPad with its price of $500 came out, the proposed price for the upcoming tablet was also lowered floating in the range of $549-$599.  Taking into consideration the gadget would have cameras and external ports it was worth a bit overpaying.

 The decision to shuffle to webOS did not in the least hurt the device, as it was already viewed as some protracted development project. The webOS platform also had lots of advantages, for example, presenting the best push notification system available at the market. But it turned that it’s not the last event of the Slate story. Another twist of plot is on the way.